So in development I obviously considered the obvious:

The nightmare before Christmas! Image courtesy of Capcom Production.

 

So like I said this is the obvious choice to look at when creating an animation about a crossover Christmas/Halloween thing. Naturally I can't make it as complex or long or detailed but it did help me to get thinking about the classic icons of the two holiday which helped me a lot!

 

 

I knew that my animation wasn't an obviously Christmas themed short so I began to look at other unconventional approaches to Christmas, when I did I came across this animation illustrated by Hugh Whyte and animated by ark G. Murphy and published by DigitalKick:

 

 

However after watching this one I discovered several routes I didn't want to go down. I didn't want to be really anti-Christmas , sad or boring. I also didn't want to use that limited sound. I want music... I think. Yet I did like the limited colour pallet. By this point I had designed a character (Which I will go into later and had fully rendered him but from here I began to question that approach.

 

Following this I tired searching for shorts that were in just one colour but it is proving harder than I thought. I want to do the whole animation in white and shaded in blue but I need to see if this is achievable with depth or if it becomes to difficult to differentiate between layers.